An unassuming Dutch traffic engineer showed that streets without signs can be safer than roads cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights. Are we ready to believe him? Best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt explains why we should. —Ed.
In the last few years, one traffic engineer did achieve a measure of global celebrity, known, if not exactly by name, then by his ideas. His name was Hans Monderman. The idea that made Monderman, who died of cancer in January [of 2008] at the age of 62, most famous is that traditional traffic safety infrastructure—warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and soon—is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.
As I drove with Monderman through the northern Dutch province of Friesland several years ago, he repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. “Why explain it?” He would follow with a characteristic maxim: “When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” Eventually he drove me to Makkinga, a small village at whose entrance stood a single sign. It welcomed visitors, noted a 30 kilometer-per-hour speed limit, then added: “Free of Traffic Signs.” This was Monderman humor at its finest: a traffic sign announcing the absence of traffic signs.
Monderman wasn’t an obvious candidate to become a traffic revolutionary. Born in the small Friesland village of Leeuwarden, son of a headmaster, he worked as a civil engineer, building roads, then as an accident investigator, examining how crashes happen. But he was an unusually fluid thinker. Over lunch during my visit, he excitedly told me that he had been reading about the theory that delta societies tend to foster innovation because of their necessary flexibility in dealing with potentially changing landscapes. He saw a parallel with the low-lying Netherlands. “I think the Dutch are selected for that quality—looking for changes—by the landscape.”
And Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection—buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example—but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals—of the electronic or hand variety—more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he “would have changed it immediately.” (full text here)
Monderman believed that the best way to change people’s behavior was to change the context. This simple insight was one of the foundations of his traffic revolution, which took root a decade before he remade Drachten. In the mid-1980s, Monderman, then a regional safety inspector for Friesland, was dispatched to the small village of Oudehaske to check the speed of car traffic through the town’s center (two children had been fatally struck). Previously, Monderman, like any good Dutch traffic engineer, would have deployed, if not an actual traffic light, the tools of what is known as “traffic calming”: speed bumps, warning signs, bollards, or any number of highly visible interventions.
But those solutions were falling out of favor with his superiors, because they were either ineffective or too expensive. At a loss, Monderman suggested to the villagers, who as it happens had hired a consultant to help improve the town’s aesthetics, that Oudehaske simply be made to seem more “villagelike.” The interventions were subtle. Signs were removed, curbs torn out, and the asphalt replaced with red paving brick, with two gray “gutters” on either side that were slightly curved but usable by cars. As Monderman noted, the road looked only five meters wide, “but had all the possibilities of six.”
The results were striking. Without bumps or flashing warning signs, drivers slowed, so much so that Monderman’s radar gun couldn’t even register their speeds. Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity. Unsure of what space belonged to them, drivers became more accommodating. Rather than give drivers a simple behavioral mandate—say, a speed limit sign or a speed bump—he had, through the new road design, subtly suggested the proper course of action. And he did something else. He used context to change behavior. He had made the main road look like a narrow lane in a village, not simply a traffic-way through some anonymous town.
And so places such as Oudehaske begin to be read less as villages than as something to be blown through on the way to some great elsewhere. Traffic engineers, in Monderman’s view, helped to rewrite these places with their signs and other devices. “In the past in our villages,” Monderman said, “you could read the street in the village as a good book.” Signs advertising a school crossing were unnecessary, because the presence of a school and children was obvious. “When you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, and when you changed it into a uniform world,” he argued, “then you have to explain things.” (...)
Monderman’s work has inspired or been echoed by a growing number of projects that, in essence, try to replace the traffic world with the social world. His ideas, often under the guise of what is known as the “shared space” movement, have found their way in one form or another into a number of other towns across Europe, from Bohmte, Germany, where the town’s leaders (after visiting Drachten) decided to scrap the lights and signs at its center, an increasingly busy artery for through traffic, to the “gossip square” in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians cross streams of traffic in a central plaza largely devoid of markings. (...)
Traffic signs, for Monderman, were an invitation to stop thinking, to stop acting on one’s own volition. In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior. As he put it to me, “There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn’t forbidden is allowed.”
Monderman loved cars. “I like to drive really fast on the Autobahn,” he admitted. But he did not love the accommodations that had been made to cars everywhere outside the Autobahn—the garish, oversized warning signs, the pens for pedestrians, the anonymous asphalt roads. For decades, traffic engineers have pursued, with the best of intentions, an impossible goal: the elimination of accidents. Monderman questioned how safe this kind of safety was. More fundamentally, he asked if mature automobile societies could, in essence, act like adults.
Tom Vanderbilt is the author of the best-selling book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), from which portions of this article were drawn. Tom blogs about traffic management at How We Drive and writes the Transport column for Slate. This article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.
Photo Credit: sociate (1, 2), hyperspace328, enrevanche, The Vanderbilt Cup Races, wwarby, Fietsberaad, Tony Austin, MD111, Peter Orosz and rogiro
Via: Jalopnik
